Forum:Navigation
Hi, I've made two navigation templates - Equipment navigation and Weapons navigation. I was also thinking about making a template for all characters divided by chapters in which they first appears (or by Family Type which would be easier to do as that data is on characters page). Xick asked to create a topic about it, so what do you think - do we need this kind of navigation? What other templates whould be nice? Note, that I can make any template like that very quickly from any tabular data (I have script that gathers data form a table). Eccenux 12:27, September 5, 2010 (UTC) PS: I've forgot - I would like add this navigation to templates so it would magically appear in all articles. :Yes! It seems awesome, I like it. Waiting for your characters template, and we need some new ideas for the characters page tho, because it's so crowded atm and there will be so many new characters, maybe categorizing that also with just letters, or locations, by chapters etc. I like the way of equipment and weapons navigation. Will we use it as footers also? Ali Kemal Ofluoğlu 12:39, September 5, 2010 (UTC) If you're doing it alphabetically we'd just be reproducing what the Categories generate. While I like the idea of navigation templates I worried that they won't be that functional in the long term as the game continues to grow they'd become the largest part of every page on the wiki. If you want to sort the Characters by chapter you could add them to the categories of Chapter 1, Chapter 2 etc or if you wanted to keep them separate from the Quests, create new categories of 'Characters - Chapter 1' or something similar. Also as these templates would have to be manually updated as new content is released. Anything that creates more work at the realease of each chapter is going to slow down how quickly we can keep up with the new content. I've seen how slowly some of the other user maintained pages like Characters, Equipment are updated and how this leads to complaints that the wiki is out of date. I've been looking over some of the larger game wikis and most of them don't have these kinds of large user maintained tables for this very reason. Unless there is some way to have the navigation templates generated off of the categories or maybe just have the navigation templates be more obvious links to the categories. Maybe what we really need is a help page for new users that explains how to use Categories. Could having more links on the sidebar be a more elegant solution? e.g. Characters >By Type >By Chap. Equipment >Weapons >Armor > Support >Potions. This also doesn't need to be an or solution we could do both. As I've recently been trying to keep all the talk for the wiki on one page, I think it might be a good idea to move this discussion to LevynLight_Wiki_talk:Community_Portal. -Xick (talk) 16:59, September 5, 2010 (UTC) p.s. All the templates need documentation, maybe add this to Bored as a new section? -Xick (talk) 17:04, September 5, 2010 (UTC) : Xick I know that there are categories, but this is not the same thing. With navigation templates you can see at a glance what is where. This is not just order alphabetically but also grouped together and more condensed. That's why they exist on many wikis - also on Wikipedias. Trust me I'm an admin on one of them. --Eccenux 19:49, September 7, 2010 (UTC) I'm not saying that navigation templates don't have their places. They are great for information that has a sequence, like who has won the best oscar, it makes sense that each page has links to the previous and next winners and they are also for information sets of a certain manageable size. You've obviously noticed the size issue as you've already separated the weapons from the rest of the equipment. But you haven't dealt with the issues I brought up: #The Templates are undocumented #They are not collapsible #the current system of weapon template vs. armor, support, and potion template will lead to too large boxes; perhaps the separate by type and then by chapter? #this wiki has limited editors, do we really want to create more pages that require manual updating because people are too lazy to use the search box? new ideas * I like the view, edit, discuss links on the wikipedia nav templates, perhasp you should include these as well -Xick (talk) 20:33, September 7, 2010 (UTC) #They are tables, they have no parameter, they don't need documentation. Eccenux 21:58, September 7, 2010 (UTC) #I'm working on it. Please add my monaco.js/css to this site js/css (please notify me on my talk page when you do as they will be in conflict) Eccenux 21:58, September 7, 2010 (UTC) #If you have the data I have the script. How large is too large for you? If the size will be too large we could split them. Eccenux 21:58, September 7, 2010 (UTC) #By far, yes! And no this is not layziness. Having too click 10 or more times to see tha same as you can on one page is not the same as baing lazy. Eccenux 21:58, September 7, 2010 (UTC) Please don't answer inside my talk it makes it very hard to read and it's why I failed to notice that you had replied. #I don't think that they the lack of parameters means that they don't require documentation. Also please mark all content copied from other wikis using templates like or . #I'll add this to the script #They will all be too large in the future. This will never be a static wiki as the game is constantly growing. I don't think that the current navigation templates take this into account. This is the same issue that is being discussed on the Community Page about how to best handle the Equipment page. While the weapons are currently divided between 4 types this makes for some easy divisions on this template but I've been thinking that most of the content of the wiki needs to be labelled by chapter. Currently the Chapter 1, Chapter 2... categories are only used for Quests and I don't think that adding the items to these categories would be a clear solution. Perhaps there needs to be Category:Equipment Chapter 1 or maybe that's not taking it far enough and it should be Category:Weapons Chapter 1. Having navigation templates that had chapter divisions as the first row of selectable navigation links would help to keep the number of links on each page down to a reasonable amount. Adding 57 links(and counting) with a navtemplate to every weapons page is far too much. #There is NO page on this wiki that is 10 clicks from the main page. Using the sidebar all of the individual pages of the characters and equipment are less than 2 clicks away from any other page. Your response failed to address my concern that these templates needs to be Manually updated every time that a new item is added or removed from the game. -Xick (talk) 23:25, September 9, 2010 (UTC) Ad.1. I don't agree, though I added the docs. I think this only makes the page look less attractive. Content licensed with CC-BY-SA don't need to be marked with any template. Ad.2. Thanks. I forgot to tell you that you should mention authors as you can find them on a history page of my monaco.js. The code is not needed I think Wikia added it already. Ad.3/4. 57 links are too much - why? Are there any constrains on Wikia like that? Wikipedia usually has much, much more links. Note that category pages are usually wider and higher and do not supply that much information. In navigation templates you have the same information as you would in 10 or even more categories and that's what I meant about 10 clicks. You can of course say I'm over exaggerating, but let's look at Template:Characters navigation. Let us say that you meet a Sparring Partner and let's say he is in the Training Camp category (he's not, but let's say he is). I'd like to see what other characters I could meet in that location and in other locations in that chapter. Navigation template: 1 click without reloading the page. Categories: 1 Camp cat., 2 Chapter 1 cat., 5,6,7,8 for other locations categories. And now let's say I want to browse through other chapters... Many, many more clicks and full page reloads. So, my question is - will you revert my changes to the templates adding the navigation system or are you fine with it? --Eccenux 19:06, September 10, 2010 (UTC) #It doesn't need to be but it's nice to have obivious links back to the source to be able to check for updates to the code. It's also much easier for people who are new to the wiki to understand templates when they are explained. # I did add the code # Wikia suggests that wikis keep to the guidelines issued by Google to stay under 100 links a page. # If you want to see the characters by location you'd use the location pages. Which are organized by Chapter and Location. I'm sure that if you want, you could find ridiculous ways to navigate around the wiki but seeing as it only has 500 pages your example of ten clicks is grossly over exaggerated. I also wasn't suggesting that the categories replace the navigation templates only that having more categories to have category counts, and category lists to compare to the nav template might be easier in the long run. I also think that having the equipment sorted by chapter is a better grouping of their relative strengths, then by weapon type, as all the weapons in Chap 2 are stronger then the weapons in Chap. Perhaps it should be by Chapter and then Type on the Template. Like This: Revert which changes to what templates? You're still ignoring my largest issue: "...that these templates needs to be Manually updated every time that a new item is added or removed from the game." They are already out of date as they don't have Chap 6 -Xick (talk) 20:09, September 10, 2010 (UTC) OK. I'm going to be honest. I'm not willing to go through a lengthy discussion to get something done here. If I would want that I would go and try to rewrite some lengthy article on Wikipedia. Wikia's guideline probably mentions that more links more links are likely to be discarded in Google's ranking. I don't think this is relevant to us. As for your suggestion on weapons navigation - I already said I don't have that kind of data. It is not available in tabular form on this wiki. If you'll supply this I can use it. And finally yes it has to be updated. As everything. I believe even outdated templates are better then nothing, but updating this template is even easier then the Weapons page. --Eccenux 20:44, September 10, 2010 (UTC) http://levynlight.wikkii.com/wiki/Weapon has the weapons with a list of which chapter they are in. -Xick (talk) 06:32, September 11, 2010 (UTC) Do you think that we need to include the Deprecated Content like the Batons and the Thugbot Glove? -Xick (talk) 06:34, September 11, 2010 (UTC) : Are thoose all weapons? Seems a bit short at first glance, but maybe they removed deprecated stuff... Anyway I can rewrite the template later... : In the mean time I was adding new param to Charcters template and noticed Unicow... And so I have some extra code in User:Eccenux/monaco.js. Thanks in advance :-) --Eccenux 11:49, September 11, 2010 (UTC) : It's definitely missing the Chapter 6 content. How should we edit the template documentation to show that Equipment and Characters also add the nav templates? -Xick (talk) 06:11, September 12, 2010 (UTC) Template:Characters navigation is showing up in the Characters Category -Xick (talk) 08:09, September 12, 2010 (UTC) and maybe } | | |Template| |Category:Chapter Data Missing}} }} Add add the appropriate line to Bored -Xick (talk) : If you think this will be useful. Currently everything above New Feron is missing. I could add them as you can base it mostly on a location but I don't want to spoil the fun for myself ;). As for the category - it was intentional. I think templates should be visible in a beginning of a category in which they are used the most. It should be easier to find them that way, but I won't insist on that. --Eccenux 20:06, September 12, 2010 (UTC) I think having the templates in the category is useful but if we are going to make them more visible it might be advisable to up their protection levels. -Xick (talk) 22:00, September 12, 2010 (UTC) : I agree - should at least be set to autoconfirmed editors. --Eccenux 23:40, September 13, 2010 (UTC) Imp is an exception as it Appears in Chap 4 in a Chap 3 area. -Xick (talk) 07:43, September 13, 2010 (UTC) : Done. --Eccenux 23:40, September 13, 2010 (UTC)